In a call center, incoming external telephone calls are sorted by an automatic call distribution (ACD) system according to certain criteria and automatically distributed to the terminals of the employees—so-called call center agents. If all terminals are busy with voice connections to external callers, the capacity of the call center is exhausted; additional calls can then no longer be answered in person but only with the aid of an interactive voice response (IVR) system.
The efficiency and quality of a call center can be measured based on the number of processed calls, as well as by the ability to reach the agents (so-called service level). It is obvious that the ability to reach an employee is inversely proportional to the duration of a telephonic customer contact. Particularly detrimental to the productivity of the employees and, hence, to the efficiency of a call center, are telephone calls, during which the external caller forces the call center agents to wait and be idle. Reasons for such forced pauses in a telephone call may be, for example, a search for documents or an internal consultation with a person in the background.
In practice, the problem often arises in this context, that the external caller ignores the call center agent's polite request to please call back after the document in question has been located or after a decision has been made, and abruptly turns away with the comment that the agent should please hold on for a moment. The agent is now in a difficult position: he is unable to estimate how long the interruption caused by the external caller will last, and whether a completion of the request presented to him will afterwards be possible at all.
Under the aspects of the highest possible service level on one hand and the personal pressure of needing to process as many calls as possible on the other hand, a nearly unsolvable conflict of objectives results for the call center agent: if he terminates the connection to the external caller after a certain amount of time spent waiting, he can spend this time saved with another caller, resulting in an increased productivity of the employee. On the other hand, the customer-friendly attitude that is expected of him, forces him to idly wait for the call to be resumed by the external caller, although he can neither foresee how long this will take, nor whether the call can be continued at all and if so, whether it can be concluded with a positive outcome.